Life Cycle Assessment or LCA is a decision-making tool designed to evaluate the environmental and human health impacts related to a product or service. The execution of an LCA allows the user to make more sustainable and better-informed strategic decisions, improve communication with current and potential customers, identify areas for improvement and cost reduction along the lifecycle as well as improve the understanding of downstream value chain, and conflicting needs between customers and recyclers.

According to the ISO 14040 standard, there are four (4) major steps of an iterative nature:
1- Goal and scope definition: this step aims to define which part(s) of a product/service life cycle will be considered as well as the functional unit that will be evaluated. If the LCA is comparative, the closer the functional units of compared products are, the more accurate the results will be. Possible scopes include:
• Cradle to cradle: This is the most comprehensive scope for an LCA and is only applicable to production processes that reincorporate "end-of-life" materials back to the production process, not upcycling or down cycling but keeping them in the same stream of materials in which they started their "life cyc".
• Cradle to grave: This entails the processes from resource / raw material extraction, component manufacturing, product manufacturing, transportation, setting up, consumer use or product use lifetime, until the end of life and waste disposal stages.
• Cradle to gate: This considers stages from raw material extraction, component manufacturing, and product manufacturing up until transportation and distribution.
• Gate to gate: Only considers the consumption and materials used for component manufacturing, product manufacturing, and distribution to the final consumer.
• Gate to grave: Only accounts for the stages after the product is ready for consumer use and end-of-life strategies.
2- Inventory analysis: The inventory describes the material and energy flows required for the product/ service to be created. It measures the input and output quantities and related emissions to the environment per production stages of the considered scope.
3- Impact assessment: The impact assessment takes all the information from the inventory analysis to establish the impact categories affected by the product/service being assessed. The impact is then measured and sorted into the mid-point and end-point categories and related indicators.
4- Interpretation: This stage involves the critical review of the obtained results along with the description of the data sensitivity. The interpretation of results allows the identification of possible areas of improvement and relevant hot spots along the life cycle of the product/service.